saturday, february 16

i think we frequently value artists
for our perception of what they are
more than it matters to us what they have done

some few accumulations of the creative act
seem to stand on their own even while
knowledge of their authors becomes the cartoon
backscatter of historymost work of any power
vanishes or becomes incomprehensible

examples multiply
only to fall away in seriesars longa is seldom true
even on the scale of a single life
and it approaches certainty that you will
never know the work, let alone the name
of the greatest artist who ever lived

modern celebrity and its discontents,
the cheap excess of criticism and theory
all the failures of humanity expressed on
the cover of a rolling stone
these are the pathological index of
purely human motivation, need, & hope

actor, singer, poet, politician —
if we love or desire in the realm of art
if we feel kinship or identity
even in the dead electric dreaming of this age
it's often the unborn moment
the trajectory
the possible act
that move and shake us
not the shape of a single artefact
but the movement of persons

and perhaps the idea, however illusory
of ourselves as motion and making,

shapers and seers of a world where
we're neither numb nor entirely bound
to the order that is given.

saturday, february 9

the cellular telephone is a powerful innovation
you can sit by one while it doesn't ring
just about anywhere you feel like
from here i can see all the way to the
front of this half-empty display case
for boilerplate boulder eccentricity

i can hear tires crunching
through the crusted snow outside
some house in nebraska
in an hour the keg will arrive
the county cops a little later

i hear the doppler drone of cicadas in the kansas summer,
broadcast football and lipsynch pop tearing at
shattered speakers, the slide of denim on skin
in some unexpected quiet instant,
the grind and shuffle of sheep eating corn
off the surface of a wooden trough
with eyes deader than disco used to be